Sermon Tone Analysis

Introduction

I want to take a brief moment to remind everyone that as we are reading the Bible together as a church family, let’s both encourage one another to read daily while also heaping grace.

Sunday marks the start of a new week and if you have fallen behind pace, let today be the day that you pick things back up.

This morning’s focus is one that I do not take lightly, but neither is it a subject that can be ignored.

It is a subject that invariably will make us each uncomfortable, but as a proclaimer of the Word of God I am not not permitted the privilege of preaching the easy things or exclusively sharing funny stories so that we can each go home with some sense that we were made to just feel good.

I don’t have that privilege because, despite what may be shared from the pulpits of Lakewood Church or Potter’s House this morning, the gospel of Jesus Christ does not promise health, wealth, or prosperity to the child of God.

In fact, I would suggest to you that health, wealth, and prosperity has little comfort to offer anyone who has been subject to the nature of crime committed against Dinah in our text this morning.

No, a life free of cancer or heart or other health-related issues that would otherwise shorten a life span, has little effect to the wounds inflicted to the memories of victims of sexual offenses.

Money may bring countless sorts of things or take someone to the most unimaginable places, but when night falls and all the ways one may normally distract themselves by are at rest, victims and their loved ones become inescapably present to their thoughts.

The same is true no matter what doors are opened to someone and how high one may climb that so-called ladder…for in but a blink of an eye, with the rush of emotion, those affected by sexual assault will come crashing back to the day they or their loved one was victimized.

As we have made our way through these first few weeks of 2022’s Chronological study as a church family, from this pulpit we have come to see that our identities are fractured by sin and that real, Holy Spirit-driven transformation is needed to reassemble that which has been broken.

What if we are the ones broken by the sin of others?

How does the gospel address these unspeakable matters?

How does the gospel challenge the way which we respond?

It’s my intent this morning to take us through the three responses in our text to Dinah’s rape in order to show to us that

The cross is where we discover how to respond to our deepest pain.

Response #1: Anger

We look first at the response of anger.

Now, I want you to know that the Bible mentions anger in two different ways and so there are two different expressions of anger.

There is anger of a good sort that is spoken of in the Bible.

This good sort of anger is referred to as “righteous indignation” and it refers to the extreme displeasure of a holy heart unable to tolerate any kind of sin.

When God angers, it is anger of the “righteous indignation” variety.

Think of it like this, man should be good but man sins and as a consequence, God is angry because in his sin, man Deuteronomy 29:26 “...went and served other gods and worshiped them, gods whom they had not known and whom he had not allotted to them.”

God cannot sin or even be tempted with sin of any kind and for that reason, he cannot tolerate sin in his people.

God’s anger is not unreasonable, unwarranted, or arbitrary passion but a result of the conflict between his holiness and sin.

In contrast to a holy anger or “righteous indignation,” we more frequently see anger referred to as an emotion that is considered sinful.

For example, in Psalm 37:8 “Refrain from anger, and forsake wrath!”

It was last week that we were helpfully reminded that Jesus paralleled anger with murder when he said that Matthew 5:22 “...everyone who is angry with his brother will be liable to judgment...” just as if he had actually committed the murder he felt in his angry heart.

And it is angry hearts that we see in the biblical record before us.

Angry hearts responding to the defilement of their sister and we might be quick to think, of all the emotional responses to take, anger seems most natural, most fitting given the situation.

I mean, so much has transpired for Jacob and his family up to the point of their lives that we find ourselves immersed in this morning.

In the chapters preceding this, we have seen that God has moved to restore the relationship of Jacob with his brother Esau after Jacob practiced deceit to steal Esau’s birthright.

With peace between Jacob and Esau, God has restored Jacob to the land of Canaan, which was great because Jacob’s father-in-law wasn’t exactly the chairman of Jacob’s fan club, either.

Yet, no sooner had the dust settled from the family’s relocation that disaster strikes.

All that had been going so cheerfully screeches to an abrupt halt.

Jacob’s daughter Dinah is raped by Shechem (Genesis 34:2), a Canaanite whose father had sold this piece of land to Jacob.

Genesis 34:7 “7 The sons of Jacob had come in from the field as soon as they heard of it, and the men were indignant and very angry, because he had done an outrageous thing in Israel by lying with Jacob’s daughter...” Shechem’s father Hamor tries to smooth things over with negotiations for Dinah’s hand in marriage for Shechem and with cold and calculated hearts, the sons of Jacob take to the family tradition of using deceit to get their way (Genesis 34:13).

Jacob’s sons convince Hamor and his son that they’ll agree to the marriage proposal if they would submit to the custom of circumcision.

The sons’ goal was to put Shechem and his father in a weakened state.

I can only imagine how satisfied Levi and Simeon must have felt in unleashing their fury upon those who defiled their sister and those who would defend her attacker.

I can only imagine how satisfying it may seem to exact revenge upon those who have caused any of us pain and wounds that simply never seem to heal.

Fairly or unfairly, the actions of another towards us have wounded us and we rage at the ones who hurt us and ourselves.

But here is something we must know:

A person who is hateful will, by definition, do hateful things.

And a person who is full of hate, refusing to yield to Christ, is like a bomb waiting to explode.

In a 1994 article, Wars’ Lethal Leftovers Threaten Europeans, Associated Press reporter Christopher Burns wrote:

The bombs of World War II are still killing in Europe.

They turn up—and sometimes blow up—at construction sites, in fishing nets, or on beaches fifty years after the guns fell silent.

“Hundreds of tons of explosives are recovered every year in France alone.

Thirteen old bombs exploded in France last year, killing twelve people and wounding eleven,” the Interior Ministry said.

“I’ve lost two of my colleagues,” said Yvon Bouvet, who heads a government team in the … region that defuses explosives from both World War I and II.… “Unexploded bombs become more dangerous with time,” Bouvet said.

“With the corrosion inside, the weapon becomes more unstable, the detonator can be exposed.”

Hatred is a lit fuse that will unleash every sin in the human heart.

There is only one person who can safely deactivate this deadly bomb called hate.

It is Jesus Christ Himself.

Christ threw His life on sin and took on the full impact of its lethal effects.

How can Jesus Christ safely deactivate our anger, our hate?

The gospel grants calm sanity to our outbursts of anger, for God’s own righteous anger and fury toward the redeemed sinner has been calmed in the cross of Christ.

Are you prone to anger?

No matter its source, be it impatience or your response to what has been done to you, anger kills.

Would you entrust to Jesus, perfect Jesus, never going to fail you Jesus, your pain?

Your anger?

In the punishment and death of Jesus, the righteous anger God has for you, has been satisfied.

If Jesus can calm God’s anger, cannot he not calm yours?

Response #2: Passivity

The next response we see in our text before is what we would call passivity or appeasement.

In other words, trying to pretend that everything is just going to be ok.

It is the exact opposite response to the one that is demonstrated by the sons of Jacob.

If we were to define appease, it would be generally described as “to make one at peace.”

It results in a lack of response at all when it is very obvious that some sort of action was needed.

We are soon to make our way to a book of the Old Testament named 1 Samuel.

It’s a book that details a critical point in the history of Israel and their independence from God.

As that book opens, the reader is introduced to the priest Eli and his sons Hophni and Phinehas, who were also in service to the Lord.

And early in the book it is very evident that the sons of Eli are deviants, unrepentant and showing no concern for the things or matters of God.

Frequently it is observed that Eli’s attention is drawn to his sons’ defilement of the things of God and all the evidence is dismissed by a father who is unwilling to punish the sin of his children.

God, being holy and perfect and righteous, is vastly unlike the bankrupt Eli and in sweeping fashion, the sons of Eli are killed in a battle and upon learning of the news of his sons’ death that day, Eli too, dies for his inaction (1 Samuel 4).

Maybe his epitaph may have said some nice words like “Peace Keeper” or “Never One to Rock the Boat,” but God’s view of the matter is clear.

In our text, the one who is obviously passive and effectively dismissing the whole crime is Jacob.

Genesis 34:5 “5 Now Jacob heard that he had defiled his daughter Dinah.

But his sons were with his livestock in the field, so Jacob held his peace until they came.”

And while Shechem’s father, Hamor, has initially gone to consult with Jacob, it appears as though he’s eerily silent on matters initially, overpowered by the anger of his sons, described in Genesis 34:7.

In fact, in contrast to the fury of his sons, Jacob is so passively unconcerned that his voice is not heard again until the end of the chapter:

That’s interesting, isn’t it?

Your daughter has been raped by the son of the man you bought your land from and your sons have just committed premeditated murder and his concern is for who?

Herein is the sinfulness of being passive in response to our pains - in our cowardice, we are only concerned for ourself.

Now, let’s do Jacob some justice and acknowledge that what is at stake in this account is nothing less than the covenant promise of God.

Jacob tells his rash sons that if the surrounding peoples unite against Jacob, he and all his family will be wiped out.

Even if Jacob survives, the land he has just bought from Shechem is certainly at risk in light of Simeon and Levi’s fury.

The promise of descendants as numerous as the sand, then, and also the promise of the land of Canaan are both suddenly endangered.

Jacob was the appeaser; he simply wanted no trouble, but this, loved one, is not an example of a gospel way of living.

The gospel grants courage to those of us tempted to just want to appease the situation through a passive response.

The gospel grants courage to those of us tempted to appease through passivity, for if God has been appeased through Jesus, we need not be concerned with appeasing others.

Second Samuel 10 records a seemingly impossible impasse for the armies of David.

David’s commanding general, Joab, “saw that the battle was set against him both in front and in the rear.”

Then he and his brother, Abishai, vowed to support each other and to leave the results in the hands of God.

Joab reinforced Abishai with these courageous words:

If the Syrians are too strong for me, than you shall help me, but if the Ammonites are too strong for you, then I will come and help you.

Be of good courage, and let us play the man for our people, and for the cities of our God; and may the Lord do what seems good to him (2 Sam.

10:9, 11–12).

Response #3: Silence

In responding to our deepest pain, we can be angry, we can be appeasingly passive, and as is demonstrated in our text, we can also be driven to silence.